Behind the khaki uniforms and the merit badges, the two organizations have vastly different political leanings.

Left: Eagle Scout Darrell Lambert holds a letter expelling him from the organization for being an atheist. Right: A girl scout creates a "confidence journal" to help promote a positive body image. (Reuters)

When the Indiana House of Representatives took up a
resolution to honor the Girl Scouts' 100th anniversary, freshman Republican
representative Bob Morris refused to sign. Instead he sent colleagues a letter
warning that the Girl Scouts were not a benign, cookie-peddling kids'
organization but rather "a group that has been subverted in the name of liberal
progressive politics" with "surprisingly radical policies" -- and, in fact, "a
tactical arm of Planned Parenthood." His February 18 letter made the national
news, and while he later walked back some of his criticisms - writing, in part,
"I realize now that my words were emotional, reactionary, and inflammatory" -
Morris reiterated his objections to the Girl Scouts, citing the group's support
of reproductive health education and quoting "Blessed
Pope John Paul II" on the topic of abortion.

While Morris's wrath seemed extreme even to his Indiana
House colleagues (at least one of whom took to selling and distributing Thin
Mints on the House floor), his anti-Girl Scout feelings are hardly unique. Back
in 2004, conservative Christians in Texas called for a Girl Scout cookie boycott to
protest the group's supposedly cozy relationship with Planned Parenthood; every
year or so, another boycott is proposed. In late 2011, a group calling itself Honest Girl Scouts organized one to
protest the Scouts' inclusion of a transgendered child. Over at Fox News, panic
over allegedly radicalized Girl Scouts has joined the War on Christmas as a
perennial source of outrage, and concerns over the group's pro-choice connections
and airy-fairy religious
affiliations have spawned a cottage industry of right-wing women's
organizations. In January of this year, a 10-year-old Girl Scout selling
cookies door-to-door in Reston, Virginia, encountered one neighbor who
blurted out that her family doesn't give money to Girl Scouts because "they
support abortion, which kills babies."

The War on Girl Scouts is getting personal.

Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts have their critics on the left. Objections
to the Boy Scouts mostly focus on the group's 1991 ban on gay members or
leaders (which is unique to the Boy Scouts USA - their Canadian and European counterparts
have no such policy). Since 2000, when the group's legal right to reject gay troop
leaders was upheld by the Supreme Court's Boy Scouts of
America v. Daledecision,
protests have mostly been held on a local scale by families, schools, and
communities. When the BSA faced a series of embarrassing revelations in 2010 about
child
sexual abuse by scoutmasters, many drew parallels with the Catholic Church,
another male-led, gay-unfriendly hierarchy that sheltered pedophiles. The BSA
is churchlike in another way: the group expressly prohibits membership (even as
Cub Scouts) of atheists and agnostics. Local Boy Scout troops and councils that
have tried (or been forced) to follow anti-discrimination policies have been
banned or ejected from the national organization.

How did this sharp division between Boy Scouts and Girl
Scouts come to be? Most adults remembering their own scouting days are only
vaguely aware that there's any difference at all between the Girl Scouts and
the Boy Scouts. What does it say about gender and child-rearing in this country
that while the Girl Scouts foster a strong ethos of feminism, environmentalism,
and multiculturalism, the Boy Scouts now embody a code of values Rick Santorum
could endorse? Is the gender
gap in electoral politics being replicated around our kids' campfires?

To put it another way, are Boy Scouts from red states and
Girl Scouts from blue?

In truth, while the two organizations were founded with
similar purposes, history has enormously widened the ideological gulf between
them. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts share a founding father: Robert
Baden-Powell, credited with inventing the worldwide scouting movement.
Baden-Powell was a soldier of the British Empire, active in battles in Africa
and India. While conquering indigenous people in what is now South Africa,
Baden-Powell met American soldier of fortune Frederick Russell Burnham, who
introduced him to the Indian lore and Wild West mythos that came to inform,
with a dose of British Kipling-ish élan, the style and substance of the scout
experience. Baden-Powell's Scouting for
Boys, published in 1908, lay the groundwork for the Boy Scouts of America
organization, which was founded in 1910 by Chicago's W. D. Boyce.

Aided considerably by Norman Rockwell, who inked covers for
its Boys' Life magazine beginning in
1913 and illustrated its annual calendar for over 50 years, the Boy Scouts
quickly came to represent a kind of all-American ideal of health, outdoor
exploration, and patriotic goodness. It also served as a pipeline to leadership
in a country still ruled mostly by men. Anyone could be a Cub Scout, but those
who have ascended to the pinnacle of scouting, Eagle Scout,
are overrepresented within military academies, NASA, and even Congress. Texas
governor and former presidential candidate Rick Perry, an Eagle Scout,
wrote his first book on the glories of scouting and the need to defend the BSA
against secularists who would try to defeat it. Structurally, the BSA tends to
wrap itself around existing power structures - so that, for instance, scout
troops are chartered by community organizations, most frequently churches.
Today, the largest single partner of the BSA is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints.

The Girl Scouts were founded in 1912 as the Girl Guides by
Juliette Gordon Low of Savannah, Georgia, after she met Baden-Powell in England
(and renamed a year later). Up until the 1950s, most Girl Scout troops were
segregated (as the Boy Scouts were), but an early push toward integration led
Martin Luther King Jr. to deem the organization "a
force for desegregation" in 1956. Increasingly, Girl Scout policies
emphasized social justice (including the formation of special
troops to serve girls living in poverty, serving time in detention centers,
or at risk for domestic violence). In 1993, when a prospective scout refused to
vow to "love God" as stated in the Girl Scout promise, the national
organization issued a ruling that any scout could substitute whatever words fit
her individual belief system. (This change prompted the 1995 formation of an
alternative group, the American Heritage
Girls, a fervently Christian
organization whose website touts its partnership with
the Boy Scouts, which it more or less mirrors in its values.) It's perhaps
obvious by this point that the Mormon Church does not support the Girl Scouts
as it does the Boy Scouts.

According to the organizations themselves, there are
currently 2.7 million boys involved in BSA and 2.3 million girls in GSUSA (the
American Heritage Girls, in comparison, boast 10,000 members). These numbers
are much lower than in previous years - the Boy Scouts had over 4 million
members in the 1970s - but they still represent a large population of kids. While
a handful of these boys and girls might grow into their generation's future Rick
Perrys or leaders of Planned Parenthood, most will not. But they will all, in
varying doses, be influenced by the worldview each organization has crafted.
Boys, if they want to learn how to tie slipknots and make fire, will do so in
an atmosphere steeped in straight male Christianity. Girls, if they want to
sell cookies and go camping, will soak up messages about empowerment,
diversity, and social activism.

And the political differences seep into subtler areas,
informing the very ways the young members approach the world. In a journal
article comparing the content
in handbooks issued by both groups, a researcher wrote, "The girls' handbook conveys messages about
approaching activities with autonomous and critical thinking, whereas the boys'
handbook facilitates intellectual passivity through a reliance on
organizational scripts." All of which goes a long way toward explaining how men
end up beginning life on Mars and women on Venus.

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